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shared by Mirna Čorak on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached

With 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, almost every moment of modern history is a cult waiting to happen. And it is becoming big business.
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The billion dollar question is how: how to make your video “go viral”, spreading your particular slice of contemporary culture across the planet like a contagion.
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Silliness is more important – but not vital, given that both the Kony documentary and the jump from space are entirely serious.
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Similarly, although sex may remain the most powerful form of advertising, it barely features within this list. Visual excitement won’t do either, given that the year’s second-biggest hit features a single camera pointed at five people and a guitar.
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irality isn’t actually a property of these videos at all. It’s a property of their audience: a description not of a particular object, but of the ways in which that object is used.
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To pass on a video or link is to become an evangelist for an instant cult: to gain the status of an initiate, complete with social capital and mutual LOLs. Unlike a biological virus, which hijacks hapless cells no matter what their owners might want, these are infections you must decide to pass on.
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shared by Mirna Čorak on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached

LivesOn, a soon-to-launch service that promises to tweet on your behalf even after you die. By analyzing your earlier tweets
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Seesaw, the app lets you run instant polls of your friends and ask for advice on anything: what wedding dress to buy, what latte drink to order and soon, perhaps, what political candidate to support.
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Take Google Glass, the company’s overhyped “smart glasses,” which can automatically snap photos of everything we see and store them for posterity.
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Jim Gemmell, “Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.”
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All these efforts to ease the torments of existence might sound like paradise to Silicon Valley. But for the rest of us, they will be hell.
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SUCH predisposition makes it harder to notice that not all problems are problems
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After all, saving the world might be a price worth paying for destroying everyone’s privacy, while a larger-than-life mission might convince young and idealistic employees that they are not wasting their lives tricking gullible consumers to click on ads for pointless products.
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shared by Mirna Čorak on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached

How many phone calls does it take to kill the internet?
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They found resilience has little to do with the presence or absence of jackbooted thugs: Belarus is at "significant risk" of internet disconnection, while China – which blacked out the entire province of Xinjiang for ten months in 2009 and 2010 – is rated at "low risk".
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Even sophisticated, highly networked countries can be at risk of a blackout if their digital frontier has a paucity of global connections. "Iran is a good example of this," says Cowie.
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One advantage in using frontier ISPs as a proxy for internet resilience is that it cuts through any biases from news reports about blackouts in developing world nations
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shared by Mirna Čorak on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached

At the moment, the four leading monsters are Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Yet 18 years ago, Apple was weeks away from extinction, Amazon had just launched, Google was still three years away from incorporation and Facebook lay nine years into the future.
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We understand pretty well the factors that determine the fortunes of companies that make things people buy – which is why, for example, one can predict thatApple won't be able indefinitely to sustain its huge profit margins on its iDevices.
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This leaves Facebook, a company that has one billion products (called users) and earns its living by selling information about them to advertisers.
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The two key factors that will determine Facebook's future are the power of network effects and the "stickiness" of its service – ie, the extent to which it can dissuade users from leaving.
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he key determinants of success or failure were (i) the average number of friends that users have and (ii) whether the difficulty of using the site comes to outweigh the perceived benefits.
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Facebook users will constitute a captive market and will be correspondingly exploited. And the company will be regulated as a monopoly.
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How much exploitation will users tolerate before they decide to quit?
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n fact, it is now so dominant that millions of people around the world think that Facebook is the internet.
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Mirna Čorak